IoT service provider North has secured a £2.6m contract with the City of Edinburgh Council to use smart city technology to improve security and surveillance across the capital.

The contract will see the build and management of Edinburgh’s CCTV Control Centre and will form part of the council’s vision to create a smart city operation facility, providing a holistic view of the city by using technology to drive operational efficiencies, improve security and analyse trends.

Set for completion in September 2022, the control centre will see the provision of high-definition CCTV cameras, expanded security coverage, and the introduction of analytics and artificial intelligence that can provide situational awareness and predict and alert new and existing threats.

The project will see North intelligently integrate the security system with traffic and transportation platforms to enhance the management of city operations. This should improve efficiency, quickly identify and address issues, provide simple and rapid retrieval of footage, and integrate with remote security systems that are currently not connected to the existing control room.

The system will allow for better city planning and will be able to provide a richer view of how people interact with the urban environment, whether on foot, bicycle or vehicle.

North’s smart city platform has the ability to allow for future integration with other smart technologies such as air quality sensors, smart parking applications, flood sensors to detect water levels, and intelligent camera analytics to monitor low emission zones.

Community engagement has also been factored into the project with North providing apprenticeship opportunities, work experience placements and volunteer schemes to support the delivery of the contract, including working with local communities and organisations.

“Edinburgh has big ambitions in becoming a world-leading smart city – a digitally inclusive, data-rich and sustainable city with services that are easily accessible by all of our residents no matter where they are in the city, or what their circumstances are,” said Cammy Day, City of Edinburgh Council depute leader. “We’re looking to deliver a more digitally-enabled proactive service to help make everyone’s lives in our Scottish capital better and so we can continue our work towards ending poverty, meeting our net zero targets and improving wellbeing for all.”

He said the partnership with North could make transformative differences to the way the city was managed, gathering real-time intelligence to improve safety on the streets, manage services more effectively and better serve the wellbeing of residents.

“Through North, alongside our other partners, we believe we’ve found a strong partnership that will deliver on our world-leading vision, changing the way we provide our services to all, while improving our communities,” said Day.

Scott McEwan, chief commercial officer at North, added:“The implementation of IoT technology within our security offering has the power to truly transform the lives of citizens, revolutionising the ways in which we work and ensuring the environments we live and work in are safe and healthy. CCTV is not only vital for crime detection, but also for preventing offences from happening and through the implementation of these transformative systems, the City of Edinburgh Council will have the ability to access data which will bring together essential and critical services to create safer communities and allow better informed decisions to be made that improve services across Edinburgh.”

The project is jointly funded by the City of Edinburgh Council and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) programme.

The project will see the delivery of:

• Refurbishment and kit out of the control room at the central monitoring facility to create a central security hub
• Upgrading the city’s digital video surveillance system, which will be adaptable and allow for integration into the council’s vision of a smart city operations centre in the future
• Video analytics, set to enhance city operations management and data analysis
• Installation of high-resolution IP cameras as visual sensors to create the video surveillance system
• Replacing cameras from analogue to IP, which will increase the quality of data captured and the capabilities of video content analysis and enable a variety of variables to be measured from data captured

North operates IoT Scotland and has offices in Glasgow, Camberley, north Wales, Newcastle, Birmingham and Southampton.